Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews, Volume 1 (21 page)

The community in whose name the rabbis were speaking was that of the earliest Jewish settlers in America. The product of the first two waves of Jewish immigration, they were mainly Sephardic (Spanish and Portuguese) and German Jews. These early Jewish settlers—the first Jewish Americans —had no concern for group rights and were totally opposed to the idea of emancipated Jews living a segregated cultural existence. They just wanted to be Americans and, allowing for the fact that their religion was Judaism (a private matter), indistinguishable to the limits of the possible from all other Americans. This, as the Haskala philosophy maintained, was most likely to be the best possible guarantee of no further persecution. The first Jewish Americans were, one might say, anti-ghetto. They had not escaped from countries in which Jews were un-free and persecuted and had to live in ghettoes only to create new ghettoes in the Land of the Free.

In 1904, in an edition of the
American Israelite
, the following stark statement was made: “There is not one solitary prominent native Jewish American who is an advocate of Zionism.”
⁷

If the views and values (and wisdom) of the earliest Jewish Americans had prevailed, Zionism would not have gotten even a toehold in the U.S.

A question that gets a complete answer later in these pages is this: How and why was it that a majority of Jewish Americans became committed to Zionism, right or wrong?

The first part of the answer (the second part being, as we shall see, the Nazi Holocaust and Zionism’s ruthless and brilliant exploitation of it) is that everything was changed by demographic dynamite.

As noted in Chapter Two, between 1881 and 1915 about three million Jews abandoned their homelands in the Russia of the Tsars. More than two-and-a-half million of them found their way to the U.S. This was the third wave of Jewish immigration into America. Many of these new immigrants (including Golda Mabovitch) settled in the larger eastern cities. And they were “inclined to Zionism”.

Why, was explained by Lilienthal with touching insight that only a Jew can have. The challenge for the Gentiles is to understand:

They had not only lived (in the homelands they had abandoned) as a separate nationality, but had voted as Jews for other Jews to represent them in governments. They mostly had spoken a language other than their environments, and had lived in a mental ghetto to balance the physical ghetto around them. The Jews from these countries had been a nation within a nation so that, when they came to the U.S. as emancipated persons, the nation complex came with them.
⁸

And that made many of them susceptible to Zionism’s nationalist propaganda; not in most cases to the extent of wanting to go themselves to Palestine to create a Jewish “home” there (Golda Mabovitch was one of those who did), but to the extent of empathising with Zionism’s nationalist ambitions.

Prior to the arrival of the great third wave of Jewish immigrants, the institutional link between the small community of religious Jews in Palestine and Jewish Americans (and assimilated Western Jews generally) was the Jewish Agency. It was essentially a philanthropic-minded body, the vehicle used by the great Jewish families of the Western world—those, Lilienthal wrote, “whose Judaic traditions made philanthropy the crowning justification of their wealth” and who “totally rejected political Zionism”‘
⁹
—to make contributions to the welfare and betterment of the religious Jews in Palestine.

After the arrival of the great third wave of Jewish immigrants, the anti-Zionist Jewish Agency was transformed, slowly but surely, into a pro-Zionist institution. Some of its anti-Zionists were outvoted by Zionists. Some did not want the hassle of confrontation and simply surrendered their seats to fervent Zionists. And others were neutralised and became merely “non-Zionists”. In addition, new Jewish American organisations were set up to advance the cause of Zionism.

By the time of the Balfour Declaration what might be called the masses of American Jewry were on their way to becoming Zionised. But the great Jewish American families as described by Lilienthal, and other prominent but not so wealthy Jewish Americans, did not give up their opposition to Zionism without a fight. Not for a while.

In December 1917, for example, Chief Judge Irving Lehman, brother of New York Governor Herbert H. Lehman, made the following most explicit statement in a speech at the Menorah Society Dinner:

I cannot recognise that the Jews as such constitute a nation in any sense in which that word is recognised in political science, or that a national basis is a possible concept for modern Judaism. We Jews in America, bound to the Jews of other lands by our common faith, constituting our common heritage, cannot as American citizens feel any bond to them as members of a nation, for nationally we are Americans and Americans only, and in political and civic matters we cannot recognise any other ties. We must therefore look for the maintenance of Judaism to those spiritual concepts which constitute Judaism.
¹⁰

(I think it is reasonable to suppose that the writings of Ahad Ha-am were at or near the top of the Chief Judge’s reading list).

That Lehman statement of December 1917 was philosophically in tune with Montagu’s thinking as expressed in his secret memorandum to his British cabinet colleagues in August of the same year. Taken together the two statements demonstrate that many of the most prominent and thoughtful of the assimilated Jews of America and Britain (and actually all of Western Europe) were united in their belief that political Zionism was a false messiah.

It is true that the main motivation for their anti-Zionism was self-interest, driven by the gut fear that the benefits of successful assimilation into Western secular culture, and the protection against persecution the Haskala way provided, could be endangered by Zionism’s Palestine project, but they were also aware of the implications for the integrity of Judaism itself of the founding of a Jewish state on a massive injustice to the Arabs of Palestine. Lehman’s view that Jews had to look for the maintenance of Judaism not to Zionism but to “those spiritual concepts which constitute Judaism” was another echo of Montagu’s thinking (and also, of course, that of Ahad Ha-Am). Montagu was depressed about the state of Judaism and believed that without a “deep sense of righteousness” there was little left to Judaism. More to the point, he was aware that Zionism, if it was successful, would make a mockery of the spiritual concepts which constituted Judaism and, very probably, given time, would destroy the little that was left of it.

In the pre-holocaust period the most graphic public expression of what most if not all wealthy and wise Jewish Americans really thought about Zionism was that of Henry Morgenthau Senior. In his autobiography,
All in a Lifetime
, published in 1921, this former American Ambassador to Turkey defined Zionism as follows:

Zionism is the most stupendous fallacy in Jewish history. It is wrong in principle and impossible of realisation; it is unsound in its economics, fanatical in its politics and sterile in its spiritual ideas. I speak as a Jew.
¹¹

Lilienthal’s view was that prominent Jewish Americans such as Morgenthau Senior, Julius Rosenwald and Felix Warburg would not have permitted “all the Hitlers in the world to change their basic philosophy.”
¹²

As we shall see, Morgenthau Senior was one of 30 prominent Jewish Americans who signed a petition to President Wilson as part of their efforts to strengthen his resolve to prevent Britain-and-Zionism determining his agenda for the Middle East and the doing of a terrible injustice to the Palestinians.

As I write I find myself asking this question: How many Jewish Americans who became Zionised had any idea of even the possibility that a Zionist
fait accompli
in Palestine might one day pose a threat to the well-being of Jews everywhere and to the moral integrity of Judaism itself? The answer to that question is unknowable. My guess is that probably not more than a handful of them had sufficient information to understand just how much might be at stake if Zionism was allowed to have its way.

A related question invited by the next chapter is: How different might the future have been if more than a small number of Jews everywhere, and Jewish Americans especially, had been aware of what the honest Zionists were writing and saying about what actually would have to be done in Palestine if a Jewish state was to be created there?

In June 1922, Winston Churchill, then Secretary of State for the Colonies, issued a White Paper that seemed to suggest the British government shared Ahad Ha-am’s interpretation of the meaning of the Balfour Declaration for Jews.

In one part, however, the White Paper added insult to Arab injury. “It is not as has been represented by the Arab delegation that during this war His Majesty’s Government gave an undertaking that an independent national government should be at once established in Palestine.”
¹
That statement was literally true but somewhat disingenuous in all the circumstances. To those with suspicious minds it indicated that when Britain had obtained the League of Nation’s endorsement of its Mandate to rule Palestine, the British were intending to stay in Palestine as the rulers for quite some time and by force if necessary.

That aside, Churchill’s White Paper was a disappointing document for Zionism. One passage explicitly rubbished a statement Weizmann had made during the Paris Peace Conference. In a reference to it the White Paper said: “Unauthorised statements have been made to the effect that the purpose in view is to create a wholly Jewish Palestine. Phrases have been used such as ‘Palestine is to become as Jewish as England is English.’ (That was Weizmann’s statement). His Majesty’s Government regard any such expectation as impracticable and have no such aim in view. Nor have they at any time contemplated... the disappearance or the subordination of the Arabic population, language or culture in Palestine. They would draw attention to the fact that the terms of the (Balfour) Declaration referred to do not contemplate that Palestine as a whole should be converted into a Jewish National Home, but that such a Home should be founded in Palestine.”
²

In a statement to the House of Commons, Churchill said: “At the same time as this pledge was made to the Zionists, an equally important promise was made to the Arab inhabitants in Palestine—that their civil and religious rights would be effectively safeguarded, and that they should not be turned out to make room for newcomers.”
³

Churchill also assured a deputation of Arabs that a Jewish national home did “not mean a Jewish government to dominate Arabs.” He added, “We cannot tolerate the expropriation of one set of people by another.”
⁴

The White Paper also said: “It is contemplated that the status of all citizens of Palestine in the eyes of the law shall be Palestinian
,
and it has never been intended that they or any section of them should possess any other juridical status.”
⁵

Despite the various assurances to them, the Arabs, all Arabs, remained deeply suspicious of Britain’s real intentions. And not without reason. On the subject of Jewish immigration the White Paper said the Jewish community in Palestine should be allowed to grow. There was the caveat that the rate of increase in the numbers of new Jewish immigrants should “not exceed whatever may be the economic capacity of the country at the time to absorb new arrivals.”
⁶
But that did not allay Arab alarm.

Weizmann also was far from happy. He had confessed to his WZO leadership colleagues that the final wording of the Balfour Declaration represented a “painful recession”, this because there was nothing in the final text to so much as hint at the prospect of the Jewish national home being allowed to become, one day, with Britain’s blessing, a Jewish state. But because of its commitment to continuing Jewish immigration, the 1922 White Paper was not completely without comfort for the Zionists.

Ahad Ha’am said that Zionism’s leaders ought to have told their people that the Balfour Declaration had not opened the way to a Jewish state.

Weizmann’s public position was that Zionism’s political work was far from finished. He was later to write: “The Balfour Declaration and the San Remo decision were the beginning of a new era in the political struggle, and the Zionist organisation was our instrument of political action.”
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There were, it is usually said, two streams of Jewish nationalism under the one Zionist banner. One stream, the
mainstream
, was that founded by Herzl and now led by Weizmann.

The other, the so-called
revisionist current,
was that founded and led by Vladimir Jabotinsky, the mentor of Menachem Begin. In the sound-bite terminology of the present day, the mainstream Zionists could have been called the moderates and the revisionist Zionists the extremists.

In reality, and as we shall see in a moment, there was only one thing that made the revisionists different from the mainstream.

From its beginning in 1897 mainstream Zionism had lied about its true purpose and the implications of it for two main reasons.

One was the need to avoid provoking too much Arab hostility too soon. After the Balfour Declaration, Weizmann himself led a campaign to try to dispel Arab suspicion of Zionism’s real intentions. He said that Arab fears about being ousted from their present position indicated “either a fundamental misconception of Zionist aims or the malicious activities of our common enemies.”
⁸
Weizmann even visited Hussein’s son Faysal in his camp near Aqaba to give the Arab leader assurance that Zionism was “not working for the establishment of a Jewish government in Palestine.”
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